Get Rich or Die Tryin’

A new issue of MMO Games magazine caught my attention at Barnes & Noble last week with the big headline Get Rich or Die Tryin’ – in reference to “28 Pages of Mad Money Secrets for World of Warcraft, Everquest II, Eve Online, Final Fantasy XI, and More.” So maybe we’re not surprised that by now there’s enough of this going on that it warrants an entire feature section of a gaming magazine, but frankly, the surprise for me is that this isn’t a headline for a magazine like Money or Forbes.

I don’t want to give away all the details, but general strategies are limited to obtaining gold by hunting, crafting or trading (buy low/sell high). In each of these categories, different details (such as locations or tactics) are revealed, claiming to yield income ranging from 6 g/hour up to individual drops that sell for as much as 400g in one shot. While 6g/hour is not at all a good use of time at only 1USD/hour, the 400g item translates to about 25USD a pop, so only getting two those a day puts you nearly on par with minimum wage earners. Any more than two gets you ahead of the game (um, the real world “game”, not the virtual one).

In my view though, the best prospect seems to be the strategy of making money through being a clever trader at the auction house. For people who enjoy this activity it becomes a “game within the game” and at the same time can turn into real $ profit. If you can get someone to front you some starter gold, you can begin doing this much earlier in your WoW career than you would have to wait before being uber enough to farm the really profitable high level drops. In fact, what a nice little reality game you could have within WoW by dropping off 5 n00bz at the auction house with 100G, give them 5 days to trade and whoever has the most gold at the end wins the pooled gold from all participants. Losers can get some sort of lovely parting gift, like a consolation scroll or something.

Out Damn Source!

Look what MTV found! A grad student from UC San Diego has posted this YouTube teaser for his upcoming documentary on MMOG gold farming. The shocker? Half a million Chinese now make a $100 a month living from acquiring and selling WoW gold to gamers in the US and EU. Clearly the amount returned by these workers is creating a hefty profit for their employers.

In other outsourcing news, courtesy of this GigaOm article, Second Life content (which you will remember can be sold for game or real currency) is being outsourced to a Vietnamese firm which works for a fraction of the cost of US artists. This is a simple parallel to the "real" world where a task that has to be done anyway gets shipped off to a lower wage provider.

Surely the forward thinking among you can continue to extrapolate from these trends. Here are some things I'm expecting to see low wage workers do in the near future:
1. increase their employer's gamerscore on XBOX Live!
2. click their employer's Google Ads
3. play my media over and over again (song, video, etc.) to increase it's popularity and position on a well-known site like YouTube or iTunes

Now let's get some comments from you on this one...